Hugo's Law Of Absolute Bureaucracy

Hugo's Law of Absolute Bureaucracy

Even in France, the home of bureaucracy, there is a general revolt against the indefatigable march of the bureaucrats. Enough is enough, everyone says (and who can deny the truth of that?). Yet.......anything else runs counter to Hugo's Law of Absolute Bureaucracy.  Hugo's Law states that the world will always become more bureaucratic, never less.

Now, far be it from me to try to put myself in the same category as the likes of Heisenburg in proposing absolute laws and I must admit a debt to great philosophers such as Parkinson, but I do believe that an absolute law is at play here. It works roughly as follows and the key to its discovery lies in putting yourself on the inside rather than on the outside looking in.

Suppose you are a bureaucrat and have just finished writing the rules that must be used to govern something, be it an action or an object. It doesn't matter which: it could be cheese, bananas, the loading/navigation of ships or the orbits of satellites. Your job is simply to write the rules. What do you do next? You could simply do nothing but that would be to risk redundancy in a time of high unemployment. So that must be unthinkable. What you clearly have to do is to find something, object or action, that is currently unregulated. Then, and only then, can you start to write rules again and thus secure your future employment. By doing so, you not only secure your continuing employment but also, unselfishly, secure the employment of others needed to ensure adherence to the rules you prescribe.

The obvious conclusion would seem to be that, in the long run, almost everyone will work for a bureaucracy. At first glance, that seems an unlikely scenario; but it doesn't necessarily disprove the law. It merely casts doubt on it. Who believed Einstein first time around? So let's explore further.

Firstly, we can discount the rich, who live on a different planet anyway but also, incidentally, will employ increasing numbers of people to deal with the bureaucracy and shield them from it. The same goes for investment bankers, although they will be subject to casino rules. Secondly, we can discount family enterprises who manage a subsistence living from various very local enterprises but who will anyway find their means so reduced by the burden of bureaucracy in the longer term that they will probably give up. Then what we are left with are people who, directly or indirectly, are working for THE BUREAUCRACY.

Now, any proposed law can be disproved by a single counter example. Where can one come from? Well, it can come only from a rule that there can be no more rules. And who would write this rule? Seemingly it can come only from a bureaucrat. Do turkeys vote for Christmas? Are they ever likely to? My case stands. Hugo's Law of Absolute Bureaucracy must be true.